A criminal justice system should protect society from crime and also punish criminals at the level of their blameworthiness. Changing Law’s Mind contends that new insights about the brain can help us in the quest to construct a fairer and more effective criminal justice system. Recent neuroscientific discoveries suggest that some of our previous intuitions about human culpability fail to reflect the reality of how the brain functions. If we ignore these developments, we risk perpetuating a justice system that punishes some people far too much and others too little or not at all.

Jennifer Mnookin has this piece in the L.A. Times, posed at Statesman.com. In part:

So what produces wrongful convictions? At least three of the often-seen causes were present here: dubious forensic science evidence, false confessions, and evidence from unreliable jailhouse informants who often have a strong incentive to tell law enforcers what they want to hear.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has expanded its role in Mexico’s fight against organized crime by allowing the Mexican police to stage cross-border drug raids from inside the United States, according to senior administration and military officials.

Mexican commandos have discreetly traveled to the United States, assembled at designated areas and dispatched helicopter missions back across the border aimed at suspected drug traffickers. The Drug Enforcement Administration provides logistical support on the American side of the border, officials said, arranging staging areas and sharing intelligence that helps guide Mexico’s decisions about targets and tactics.

Officials said these so-called boomerang operations were intended to evade the surveillance — and corrupting influences — of the criminal organizations that closely monitor the movements of security forces inside Mexico. And they said the efforts were meant to provide settings with tight security for American and Mexican law enforcement officers to collaborate in their pursuit of criminals who operate on both sides of the border.

This essay proposes two reforms to the pre-sentence report (PSR) in light of increasing recognition that plea bargaining, not trial, is the major decision point in criminal prosecutions.

PSRs are important to plea bargaining and sentencing because they contain the critical information that will be used in imposing a sentence. The sentence will sometimes be mandated by the criminal record and other information in the PSR; for example, a record may mean that there is a mandatory minumum sentence, or that probation is unavailable. In most other cases, the sentence will be highly influenced by the contents of the PSR. Given the importance of the PSR, in a rationally designed system, the PSR would be available before critical decisions about the case are made. Yet, under current practice, the PSR is generally not prepared or available until after entry of a guilty plea. This means that all parties are pleading in the dark – they can be surprised by a mandatory or presumptive sentence based on ignorance or misunderstanding of the defendant's criminal record or other important, pre-existing facts. While deferring preparation of the PSR until after disposition might have made sense in an era when many cases went to trial, it is unacceptable when virtually all cases are pleaded. Accordingly, PSRs should be prepared in advance of pleas, so that all parties can make a deal knowing the facts that reveal what the bargain actually means.

In prior work I have argued that the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause of the Eighth Amendment should be read to prohibit the federal government from imposing the death penalty for crimes occurring within States that do not authorize capital punishment. This Article elaborates upon that argument and situates it within the particular context of the case of United States v. Michael Jacques. Jacques is being prosecuted for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of his twelve-year old niece, alleged to have taken place entirely within the State of Vermont, which does not authorize the death penalty. Because Jacques allegedly used text messages and a social networking website to facilitate the kidnapping, however, his crime constitutes a federal kidnapping, punishable by death because the victim was killed.

Gov. Mike Beebe said Tuesday that he did not plan to grant pardons in the “West Memphis Three” case unless evidence showed that someone else was to blame for the murders of three young boys in 1993. The three men who were convicted, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., now have 10 years of what amounts to unsupervised probation after being released from custody on Friday in a swiftly arranged plea deal. Mr. Beebe said he did not consider pardons until all sentences were completed, and his term will have expired long before the probation ends. After an HBO documentary detailed their case in 1996, the men garnered celebrity support and hefty donations. The original murder convictions were set aside amid doubts about the evidence. The three pleaded guilty to lesser charges on Friday in exchange for sentences of the 18 years that they had already served.

This short article, prepared for an international forum on criminal procedure, describes the history of the use of electronic surveillance to combat terrorism in the United States. It shows how the restrictions on its use has evolved into a compromise between traditional law enforcement norms and military/national security norms, just as the apprehension and treatment of terrorists has muddled the law enforcement and military roles. The article concludes that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s compromise is a reasonable accommodation of the peculiar characteristics of modern, international terrorism.

Few questions of competency are as befuddling or as controversial as the question of a person’s competency to consent to sexual relations. Any consideration of this question necessarily implicates issues of law and clinical assessment, and analyses of this question are usually conflated with discussions of politics, social mores and “morality.” This inquiry is further complicated by the fact that there is no unitary definition of “competence” in the law in general.

WASHINGTON — Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been more likely to be hunting for potential threats to national security than for ordinary criminals in recent years, but much of the time found neither, according to newly disclosed internal information.

Data from a recent two-year period showed that the bureau opened 82,325 assessments of people and groups in search for signs of wrongdoing. Agents closed out most of the assessments, the lowest-level of F.B.I. investigation, without finding information that justified a more intensive inquiry.

Recent research into the psychological and neurobiological underpinnings of psychopathy has raised the question of whether, or to what degree, psychopaths should be considered morally and criminally responsible for their actions. In this article we review the current empirical literature on psychopathy, focusing particularly on deficits in moral reasoning, and consider several potential conclusions that could be drawn based on this evidence. Our analysis of the empirical evidence on psychopathy suggests that while psychopaths do not meet the criteria for full criminal responsibility, they nonetheless retain some criminal responsibility. We conclude, by introducing the notion of rights as correlative that even if psychopaths were to be fully non-responsible, it would still be warranted to impose some form of civil commitment.

This paper is a brief analysis of a special request to Statistics Canada, made in July 2011, concerning female victims of spousal homicides (1995 - 2009). This study updates results from an earlier study I did in 2010 (SSRN #1599705). No support was found for the claim that the long-gun registry has been effective. As far as it can be determined, the long-gun registry has not saved a single woman’s life.

Redzic raised issues of whether the accused had truly been advised under due process of the charges against the defendant since the government was using an uncharged basis for asking that the conviction be upheld. But now the government in Stinn is saying that it makes a difference whether the government charges a case under 1346. Is the government taking the opposite position in these two cases (Redzic and Stinn), and is this problematic?

Police departments across the country are relying upon Global Positioning System (GPS) devices to initiate or further criminal investigations. GPS-enabled surveillance allows law enforcement agents to collect continuous, detailed, and real-time location information, without incurring the commensurate costs in dedicated employee resources. With increasing frequency, federal, state, and municipal law enforcement agencies are attaching GPS devices to vehicles, often without a warrant, to obtain evidence.

WASHINGTON — Every year, more than 75,000 eyewitnesses identify suspects in criminal investigations. Those identifications are wrong about a third of the time, a pile of studies suggest.

. . .

In November, the Supreme Court will return to the question of what the Constitution has to say about the use of eyewitness evidence. The last time the court took a hard look at the question was in 1977. Since then, the scientific understanding of human memory has been transformed.

This is the introductory chapter to the book Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will & Determinism. It contains an overview of all of the chapters contained in this book, and it also explains the central themes that run through these chapters.

The first legal determination of wrongful execution in the United States may very well be in the making in Texas. One of the state’s district courts was recently in the midst of investigating whether Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004, was actually innocent. The court has been interrupted by objections from Texas prosecutors and the presiding judge’s retirement, but if the court proceeds, this may very well become a bona fide case of wrongful execution. Texas, just like other jurisdictions, is ill-equipped to provide any relief for such an egregious wrong, however. This Article identifies the difficulties that the heirs, families, and friends of wrongfully executed individuals face in attempting to obtain compensation for this wrong. The Article highlights that statutory compensation schemes overlook the issue of wrongful execution and the greater injustice it entails and urges that the statutes be amended in light of this grievous wrong that has come to the fore of American criminal justice systems.

Legal statuses, prohibitions, and protections often turn on the presence and degree of physical pain. In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. The omnipresence of pain in law suggests that the law embodies an intuition about the ontological primacy of pain. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has had a confounding lack of external verifiability. As with other subjective states, we have been able to impute pain’s presence but have not been able to observe it directly.

Fifteen years after the Law Commission’s rejection of pre-trial recording of cross-examination, it is back on the reform agenda. Drawing from research examining comparative pre-trial and trial practices in cases of sexual offending, this article discusses the backdrop to the debate surrounding pre-recording, including the provisions of the Evidence Act 2006 and the approach of the courts to alternative ways of giving evidence. The benefits and drawbacks of pre-trial recording of evidence for adult witnesses are canvassed – including practical, evidential and psychological issues – leading to the conclusion that rather than a presumption in favour of any particular alternative way of giving evidence, close consideration of the individual circumstances of each case is required.

New York (CNN) -- A New York district attorney plans to drop criminal charges against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn related to allegations that he sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper, attorneys for both the housekeeper and Strauss-Kahn said Monday.

Kenneth Thompson, who represents alleged victim Nafissatou Diallo, addressed reporters after a meeting with prosecutors that lasted less than half an hour, and hours after filing a motion asking a judge to halt proceedings in the case and appoint a special prosecutor.